Improving Your Ad Rank in Adwords.

You might think you’ve got everything sorted when you set up your campaign. You’ve got your ads, you’ve got your keywords, you’ve done all the research and gone through the whole process. You set your ads running and leave them to gather up a bunch of money. However, when you come back to check on them, you’re finding the interest is low, the clicks aren’t converting, and your ads aren’t showing up much at all.

You might be suffering from a poor Ad Rank. Not every ad gets equal treatment, and some ads are going to be shown up higher than others. The Ad Rank determines where on the Google Search Page your ad is going to be shown. You want to get as close to position 1 as possible, but when you first start your campaign, you’ll likely find you’re nowhere near the best position. There are a few things you need to remember when setting up your campaign that’ll help you reach the top spot.

Ad Quality

When you ask anyone about improving your Ad Rank, chances are that this’ll be the first thing you’re told about. Your Ad Quality is a mix of various different factors that play a large part in determining your Ad Rank and position on the search page. Improving on these factors is going to make a big difference to how your ad performs:

Expected Clickthrough Rate – This is the estimated likelihood on how many clicks your ad will get compared to the amount of times it’s shown.

Ad Relevance – This is how relevant your ad text is to the keywords that it’s using. If your ad is talking about something completely unrelated to the keywords, the Ad Quality is going to suffer.

Landing Page Quality – This is determined by various factors relating to your landing page. Making your landing page relevant, promoting trustworthiness by openly sharing information, making your site easy to use, reducing loading times and making your landing page work on various different platforms will all increase the quality of it in Google’s eyes.

Advert Bid

This seems like the more obvious choice when it comes to determining Ad Rank, but your bid does not play as much of a part in the process as you might think. Your Ad Quality will determine the position of your advert, and your bid will allow you to compete with others with a high Ad Rank.

If you have an Ad Rank of 2, you are not going to be above an ad with an Ad Rank of 10, no matter how much money you throw at Google. But if you and a competitor both have an Ad Rank of 10, then the one with the highest bid is the one that is more likely to come up on top. Focus on increasing your Ad Quality before you start worrying about the bid, but remember that a higher bid will let you compete with equal advertisers.

Campaign History

This is a lesser known aspect of Ad Rank that is highly important. It affects a variety of factors, including your expected CTR, and it isn’t one that you can build up as quick as the other two. Your Campaign History lets Google judge how likely your ads are to succeed based on previous successes and profit. If you’ve proven over time that your campaigns are trustworthy and profitable, Google is more likely to give your ad the top spot.

Obviously, when you first start your campaign you don’t have the Campaign History you need. You’ll likely find, depending on what you are advertising, that you aren’t at the top of the page despite having a solid bid and a great Ad Quality. This doesn’t mean it’s useless, obviously, as you can still develop great results even if you aren’t at the top placement.

Over time, as Google realises how successful your adverts are and how much profit you’re making, you’ll become the more trustworthy account, and new campaigns will be behind you in the rankings. It’s a method of rewarding longterm success that you’ll want to keep in mind if you’ve done everything you can and are still trailing behind your more experienced competitors.